Chapter 18
My first thought walking in was a crime scene.
Files stacked in chronological order, photographs pinned in a line, medical documentation laid out in a sequence that built toward something.
It wasn't fair to Kearan, who'd clearly spent hours making it precise, but the geometry of it hit me wrong in the way that means bad news is coming.
Kearan stood at the far end of the table, hands flat on the surface, looking like he'd been standing there a long time. Grayson was already there, off to the side with a notebook open.
"Hey," I said, because walking into a room where two people are arranged to deliver a terminal diagnosis requires something, and I didn't have the vocabulary to match what I was reading. "So this is ominous."
"Sit," Kearan said. Not a request. The voice of someone who'd rehearsed this and needed me contained. "I'm going to walk you through it."
I didn't sit. I moved closer instead, scanning without touching. My name was on multiple documents. Dates I recognized and the compound I'd first been taken to after Ro had handed me over to division leaders. "You've been working on this a while."
"Since the bond rejected Ryker. There was a reason the misdirection lasted so long without anyone questioning it."
"He brought me in six hours ago," Grayson said. "Wanted verification before you knew."
"Okay." I sat.
He moved to the first file, hands steady, and I appreciated that, the way he'd channeled rage into clean information delivery. "Your food supply," he said. "I've been tracking it since we found the inhibitor in your system. But I tracked it backward."
He showed me a calendar in his meticulous hand, dates circled, dates with notations, question marks resolving into certainty. "It started about the time you entered division custody. One small dose that you probably never even noticed."
"You're saying someone poisoned me."
"I'm saying someone fed you an inhibitor compound in a way that you wouldn't become suspicious" he corrected, in the voice he used for news that was going to hurt. "Which raises the question of who had access to your food during that time."
Second file. Access logs, kitchen rotations, delivery manifests, all cross-referenced. "I didn't feel right about everything after the bond rejected Ryker, so I started switching out your food provided by the division. Someone had tampered with it."
"Say the name."
"Evelyn Blackwood."
Evelyn. The hard Division woman from the last compound, the one who'd looked at me like I was contaminating her air, who'd been cruel to Rhiot with the precision of somebody who'd made a study of finding the soft spot and leaning on it.
I'd spent a lot of energy not confronting her, because some people aren't worth it.
"I didn't remember seeing her at the first compound."
"She wasn't there," Grayson said, clinical. "But someone else was."
"Not that bitch again." I said.
"I didn't know who Maren's handler was until just before I called Grayson in.
" Kearan watched me close, tracking whether the fury was about to tip into something he couldn't manage.
"They have an entire collection of people…
a network that believes in the same thing. Means, opportunity, and motive."
"Motive being she hates me."
"Motive being bigger than that. We'll come back to it.
" He moved to the second set of files. Toxicology now, chemical breakdowns, bonding-mechanism analysis.
"The inhibitor wasn't random. It was engineered, specifically, to interrupt the mating mechanism at the neurological level.
Whoever built it understood Agenti biology in detail.
The kind that comes from formal training, not field guesswork.
They identified the exact pathways involved in mate bonding, calculated the molecular structure to interrupt signal transmission, and built something that could be administered over time without causing systemic failure. "
"That's not amateur," I said.
"That's someone with medical credentials or military clearance. Someone who studied shifter bonding at a level most people never touch."
Grayson's pencil moved, not taking notes, calculating, his eyes going unfocused. "You already know who," he said.
Kearan nodded.
"So do I," I said, and the name was already on my tongue. "Maren Voss."
Kearan didn't flinch. That was the thing. He'd been standing here holding the knowledge of what Maren engineered, what she'd put in my body deliberately and consistently, and his voice stayed level. "Yes."
And the whole thing reorganized. Evelyn had access, sure. But Evelyn wasn't a healer. She didn't have the neurobiology to build a compound that interrupts shifter bonding. She was the handler. Maren was the architect.
Maren Voss, who Kearan had saved. Who he'd pulled burns into his own skin to keep alive.
Who he'd let the team misunderstand because protecting that story was easier than digging up the truth.
She'd designed the thing that had ruined my bond with Ryker.
Calculated the doses. Handed the recipe to someone with access to my food.
"Tell me what it actually does," I said.
He pulled a document that read like a thesis, diagrams, flowcharts.
"Agenti bonding is neurologically coordinated.
Multiple mates, multiple neural pathways, and those pathways strengthen with proximity and intention and the feedback loops that make up a bond.
The more complete the connection, the stronger each bond gets.
" He pointed. "This compound interrupts transmission at the synapse.
Small consistent doses cause minor disruption, confusion, some emotional dysregulation, nothing that reads as sabotage because you'd chalk it up to stress.
Those doses over time stop the synapses firing right.
The pathways don't strengthen. The bonding stalls. "
"So I've been eating something that's been keeping my bonds from completing."
"Exactly," he said, pulling my own medical records.
"Why," I said. "Why not just poison me outright? Or just kill me?"
He moved to the third set of files, and this was the bigger shape, the thing that made the small pieces line up.
"Because an Agenti with incomplete mate bonds lives in constant neurological imbalance.
The bonding drive never resolves. If you'd died, then they'd only turned Trux and Seph. They want an entire functional team."
He laid out redacted records, where names and dates were missing, but the info was there.
"Incomplete bonding, in theory, done with an entire pack, would keep the pact structure. There were rumors about tests like this years ago, but I never believed them."
The room went quiet.
"Trux," I said.
"Trux's Hesolga has been carefully calculated" He pulled the last file.
No evidence inside. A photograph. A memorandum.
An order out of the inner Division faction.
Maintain operative asset in controlled state.
Asset designation: berserker, controlled.
Operational value: high. Recommendation: maintain frenzied state to preserve operational utility through pack dynamics.
"A controlled berserker," I said.
"Someone figured out that an Agenti in advanced Hesolga has operational value.
Enhanced strength, no inhibition against violence, useful anywhere controlled aggression is required.
So instead of letting Trux resolve his Hesolga, instead of letting the bonds complete and stabilize him, they decided keeping him at the threshold was worth more.
And the only way to hold him there was to keep the entire pack frenzied.
Likely there were going to abduct or kill you before you finished the bond with the last mate so we all stayed this way forever. Or until we rip ourselves apart."
"Under orders from Maren," I said.
"Taking orders from whoever sits above both of them. But Maren built it and Evelyn deployed it."
He didn't say anything for a second. Just looked at the files like they'd betrayed him. Maybe they had.
"Maren Voss engineered a poison to keep Trux deteriorating on a schedule so the inner faction would have a berserker team on tap," I said, slow and cold.
"She built it knowing it would push Trux toward the exact rage that made him useful, and the rest of you.
" The fury landed then, not the explosive kind, the cold architectural kind that knows exactly what it's aiming at.
I looked at him. Really looked. He was standing there holding the fact that the woman he'd healed, absorbed injury for, protected with his silence, was the architect of the thing destroying his best friend and fracturing his team.
"How long have you known?" I asked.
"Suspicions, for a while. Confirmation for an hour. Verifying the chemistry, cross-referencing it against research published under her name, confirming the timeline. I needed to be certain before I brought it to you."
"Is this the full scope?" Grayson asked quietly. "Or is there more?"
Kearan moved to the last document. "If the inhibitor was built to keep the whole team frenzied, it wasn't built only for Parker."
Quiet. The kind that comes after something reorganizes your whole understanding of what you're fighting. This wasn't sabotage, it was strategic weaponization.
"There's more," Grayson said. "If they built this test protocol for Trux, they built it for other Agenti.
Other assets. This isn't about Parker or Trux or this team.
It's a capability the inner faction has been quietly building.
A program that manufactures controlled berserkers by fragmenting mate bonds. "
I got there before he finished. "They're making an army."
"There is not telling how many times they've attempted this. How many bonds they've ruined or how many lives they've destroyed."
"What do we do?" I asked.
His gaze met mine. "We complete the bonds before they can stop us. We find Maren and Evelyn and pull whatever they know about the larger program out of them. And then we burn the whole thing down."
"And Trux," Grayson asked.
"Trux stabilizes. That's the priority. Finishing the bond will stabilize the Alpha. Everything else waits until he's not actively self-destructing." He gathered the files, arranging them, the motion keeping him upright. "I need to tell the team."
"Not tonight," I said. "Let them rest. Tomorrow we will tell them about what you found."
"And then," Grayson said quietly, "we hunt."
Kearan met his eyes. "Then we hunt."